ThinkChicago has opened college students’ eyes to the city’s tech scene. The Lollapalooza tickets don’t hurt

Oliver San Juan, an alumnus of ThinkChicago, talks about the program’s benefits as current ThinkChicago attendees tour Relativity, where San Juan now works as a software engineer. (Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune)

Oliver San Juan, an alumnus of ThinkChicago, talks about the program’s benefits as current ThinkChicago attendees tour Relativity, where San Juan now works as a software engineer. (Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune)

In the effort to recruit recent college graduates to live in Chicago and work in its technology industry, one program has a secret weapon: free tickets to Lollapalooza.

ThinkChicago — organized by World Business Chicago’s tech arm, ChicagoNEXT; Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office; Lollapalooza; and the University of Illinois — kicked off Wednesday, bringing roughly 200 graduate and undergraduate students from around the country to the city. The students will tour tech companies and hear industry leaders speak. When all the programming is over, they’ll head to the destination music festival in Grant Park.

Anecdotally, companies and students involved in the program — which also brings students to town in the fall for Chicago Ideas Week — say it’s an effective way to convince participants to work in the city after graduation. But World Business Chicago, the city’s economic development arm, does not have data on how many of the more than 1,400 students who have participated in the program since its launch in 2011 have landed jobs in Chicago.

World Business Chicago is working to gather more data on ThinkChicago’s alumni, spokesman Benjamin Kelner said. He provided a list of about 40 companies that have hired people who participated in the program between 2011 and 2014, including Grubhub, JPMorgan Chase and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Now a new technology consultant at PwC, Crystal Ding majored in chemical engineering at Purdue University. She was all set to work in the oil and gas industry or another field related to her major. Attending ThinkChicago in the fall of 2015 opened her eyes to new possibilities, Ding said. She didn’t know Chicago had much of a tech scene and thought working in the industry meant going to California.

“That got me thinking, ‘Maybe I can do something else,’ ” she said.

That is the goal of ThinkChicago, said World Business Chicago President and CEO Andrea Zopp: to let students know that there is a tech scene in Chicago that offers challenging career opportunities.

“They get the Silicon Valley, they get Seattle, but they don’t always get, ‘Oh, there’s a … really exciting, engaging tech scene right here in Chicago,’ ” Zopp said.

The program has grown every year, she said. It started out with 25 to 50 participants in the first years, and the Lollapalooza partnership started in 2013. This year, the program received a record number of applications at more than 1,000, Zopp said.

ThinkChicago’s organizers also take the program on the road, hosting networking events and career fairs on campuses around the country. Chicago-based Relativity, which makes software that analyzes data gathered during litigation, became a sponsor for that portion of the program this year.

Relativity sees it as a long-term investment, said Jessica Cruz, the company’s team lead of campus recruitment. Going to the campuses lets the company find out what students are learning and helps Relativity build brand awareness — a key to recruiting recent grads for a company that doesn’t make a consumer-facing product.

“It is somewhat difficult sometimes to compete with those big names like Google and Facebook because they’re household names, so students know about those companies,” Cruz said. “When we attended a career fair where Google was there as well, they had huge lines at the Google booth and eventually (the students) would trickle down to us.”

Now a software engineer at Relativity, Oliver San Juan first came across the company at ThinkChicago’s career fair three years ago during the program’s fall session. San Juan attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, but he had not heard of Relativity, then called kCura.

He completed an internship and was hired for a full-time position after he graduated in December 2016. Until San Juan participated in ThinkChicago, the main interactions he had with potential employers were through career fairs on campus.

“It’s one thing to go up to a recruiter at a campus career fair,” San Juan said. “It’s quite another one with a group of students who are trying to figure out where they’re going to work and what they’re going to do.”

Similar to Relativity, Uptake Technologies relies on ThinkChicago to introduce itself to potential employees and hires participants for internships and full-time jobs once they graduate, said Kami Bond, senior vice president of people at Uptake.

The talent that comes to the data analytics company through ThinkChicago gravitates toward Uptake.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, and its data science and engineering roles, she said.

Workers with data science skills are in high demand in all industries as companies increasingly rely on insights gained from big data analytics to better understand their customers. Bond said getting students into Uptake’s offices through ThinkChicago helps get them excited about the environment there and show them what type of work they could be doing.

“They like that (they) are the foundation of what our company is based on and how front and center they are to how we work with products and customers and our clients,” she said.

ThinkChicago kicked off Wednesday morning at 1871, the city’s premier tech hub in Merchandise Mart. The participants will have breakfast at Uptake on Thursday and are scheduled to tour other companies such as Relativity. They’ll receive training on topics like design thinking and hear from tech leaders such as Nicole Yeary, founder and CEO of Ms. Tech, and an official from the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology.

Thursday afternoon, the participants will pick up their Lollapalooza wristbands and will be set loose on the festival Friday. ThinkChicago is free for students, and the summer session attendees get their tickets to Lollapalooza for free as well, though they cover the cost of their transportation to Chicago and lodging. The program is paid for by financial and in-kind sponsorships raised by World Business Chicago, a public-private partnership.

The access to technology companies in the city is vital for the students who participate to learn about the tech ecosystem in town, said Alya Adamany Woods, executive director of ChicagoNEXT. The free Lollapalooza tickets are the cherry on top.

“Our goal is attracting and retaining these students to come, to want to stay in Chicago to work here,” she said. “The more different ways they get to learn about Chicago, the more likely it’ll be that it’ll stick.”